"...Failure to see the benefits as well as the costs of secondary vegetation and the swidden agricultural system has led to government policies for settling swidden farmers—many of which have been failures. A more efficient, as well as humane, policy would be to invest in research on methods of maintaining the biodiversity associated with swidden fallows while increasing their productivity and soil-sustaining properties. Failure to understand secondary successional vegetation has also meant that resource managers have often failed to recognize the implications, both positive and negative, of swidden agriculture on biodiversity, watershed hydrology, and carbon sequestration (Skole et al. 1998). Finally, models of global climatic change have been based on an extreme scenario of forest conversion to degraded pasture or impoverished grassland (Giambelluca 1996). Failure to account for the effects of landscape heterogeneity may mean that significant effects of land-cover change are not being recognized. Swidden cultivation is an old paradigm built around the temporary removal of trees but not of the forest. As we enter the new millennium, we would do well to recognize the power of this paradigm for managing tropical forest ecosystems..."